Suchergebnisse

I reexamine Douglass North and Barry Weingast's argument regarding credible commitment and sovereign debt in post-revolution England. The central problem that the architects of the revolution settlement had to solve, I argue, was not the king's frequent reneging on financial commitments (a symptom), but the moral hazard that generated the kings' malfeasance (the underlying cause). The central element of the revolution settlement was thus not better holding kings to their commitments, but better holding royal advisors to account for all consequences of the Crown's policies—through what we now call ministerial responsibility.

Scholars have suggested that electoral systems should be designed to promote (1) fair representation of parties, (2) good governmental performance &/or (3) adequate local representation. These three criteria pertain to three different kinds of accountability-the accountability of parties to their supporters; the accountability of governments to their citizens; & the accountability of MPs to their supporters-which cannot be simultaneously maximized. In this essay, I discuss each criterion in the abstract & with specific reference to the current Chilean electoral system & proposals to reform it. References. Adapted from the source document.

Patrick Fournier and Masaru Kohno (2000) have considered some apparent differences between my view of strategic voting in Japan (Cox 1997) and Steve Reed's (1990). I think they succeed in showing these differences to be small in most instances. Along the way, they note some problems with the use of the S–F ratio. In this note, I comment briefly on this latter issue.

Tests hypotheses on variation in number and characteristics of political factions in the bicameral national parliament; focus on the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

In this Note, I comment briefly on Browne and Patterson's interesting article on rational nominating behaviour in Japan. Their empirical results appear sound. Where I differ is mostly in how to interpret them.Browne and Patterson frame their article as providing 'a critical empirical test of the proposition that the nominating behaviour of Japanese parties is based on rational calculation'. Presumably Browne and Patterson did not mean to claim that they were testing the rationality assumption, as such a thing would be problematic from the usual Lakatosian view of social science. Instead, what they are really aiming at are previous studies that either directly impugn the ability of Japanese nominators to deduce and implement optimal seat-maximizing solutions to the nomination problems posed by Japan's former electoral system or that report 'error rates' that appear to them to call into question whether the nominators' main goal really could have been seat maximization.